If curator Barry Bergdoll’s riveting MoMA preview talk was any indication, his six-part A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts series promises to be a landmark in our understanding of the display of architecture in museums.

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) romanced Lucrezia Borgia, climbed Mount Etna and invented the semicolon. Titian painted his portrait. An exhibition in Padua focuses on the man and his collection, both extraordinary.

In the March 21 issue, Walter Kaiser writes, “What, in the end, is most idiosyncratic about the quattrocentro artist Piero della Francesca is the essential nature of his mind, which was molded both by artistic and by mathematical perceptions.”

In the May 9 issue, Sanford Schwartz writes, “This exhibition of the mid-nineteenth-century portraitist William Matthew Prior refutes the idea that antebellum American artists usually showed African-Americans in a trivializing manner.”